In the Memoria gallery in Carabanchel it is cold, and it is uncomfortable to walk on uneven ground, like freshly turned earth. Remains of ruin pile up in the corners and, in the center of the soulless room, Federico García Lorca, with his body present, lies inside a grave dug less than a meter from the surface. There are no traces of pain on his face, nor any bullet holes on his body. No apparent sign of violence beyond that inflicted by the passage of time, clearly aged compared to the image we have of the poet. He wears a black wool coat, even though he was shot in the middle of August in Granada, and his feet remain incongruously upright, as if that part of his body had resisted death.
“Next door is not only the Carabanchel prison, a symbol of Franco’s repression, but in any of its streets, in this same space, if you dig a hole you will find a trench,” says the artist Eugenio Merino (Madrid, 1975). ), author of the disturbing installation, Ruina, which achieves exactly what it aims to do, stopping you in your tracks. and that we rethink his figure again. “They wanted to give him a very manipulated and folkloric image, always associated with the Romancero gita no, that’s why I wanted to represent him at an older age, the Lorca of the 1930s, who has experienced the brutal dehumanization of a city like Nueva York and has a very strong ideology. They wanted to depoliticize him, and the reality is that he was a victim of Franco’s barbarism, murdered for his ideas and for his homosexuality.” For red and for “faggot.”
Merino has covered the poet’s body with a glass through which the visitor can pass, as if trampling on his memory. “You cannot present a body when this body is a mystery that has not yet been solved,” says the artist, for whom the only way to represent it is underground. “Which is at the same time the way to represent all the disappeared,” concludes Merino, an artist who for years has captured all the attention of Arco (from the Franco inside the Coca Cola refrigerator to the dead Picasso or the Ninot of King Felipe II) and that this year brings visitors from the fair to Carabanchel.
